Sugar Free Cakes & Biscuits...

Sugar Free Cakes & Biscuits...

Don't you love how you stumble across an old photo and it reminds you of an experience or a yummy cake? I was just browsing my photos and came across this delicious sugar-free cake that I baked for one of the Inner Child Weekends, so delicious and sugar-free too!

Sugar-free cakes, biscuits and sugar-free 'chunky' flapjacks!! Stored in my cake tins adorned with owls ... A few years ago I did a shamanic journey with Linda in the Mandala Hut at Bliss Cottage, it was so powerful and my power animal was a wise owl... at the time I believed I was 'stupid', not 'academic' and I didn't go to university because I wasn't clever! Well, that seems like another lifetime ago now, in fact it was another life - I am such a different person today thanks to Ayurveda & Linda.

The original recipe used fresh cream but in Ayurveda, we are advised not to eat fruit and dairy together. According to Ayurveda, it isn't good to eat milk/yoghurt and high-sugar or acidic fruits together. In the case of high sugar fruits, the milk hampers the digestion process of the fruit and the sugars may ferment. In the case of acidic fruits, the acid in the fruit curdles the milk, leading to excess acidity. There are so many non-dairy alternatives on the market you can use, see my non-dairy vanilla cream recipe below.

I love recipe books and like to adapt them to 'sugar-free' or just to my own preferred taste, its great experimenting but it doesn't always work out exactly as I intended but practice makes perfect!

Davina McCalls Victoria Sponge recipe is a great one if you are trying to wean yourself off sugar and using my Vanilla Cream topping makes it a fabulous celebration cake. Here's the recipe:

Decoration/filling: strawberries, raspberries or other berries in season

1 Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Grease 2 round 20cm sandwich tins and line them with baking parchment.

2 Cream the butter extra thoroughly until it’s really, really soft and fluffy. This is most easily done with an electric whisk or a stand mixer. In a separate bowl, mix the spelt flour with the baking powder and whisk together until well combined.

3 Add an egg to the creamed butter, then a couple of tablespoons of the flour. Fold this flour in, then continue adding eggs and the remaining flour alternately until all the eggs have been added. Fold in the last of the flour. Mix the vanilla seeds with the maple syrup, then gently fold this into the mixture.

4 Divide the mixture between the tins and bake in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes, until the cakes are springy to touch, light brown and shrinking away from the sides of the tin. Leave them to cool in the tins until just warm, then turn them out on to a cooling rack.

5 Allow the cakes to cool completely before filling. Spoon this on top of one of the cakes and spread it out evenly, leaving a border – this allows for the cream to be squashed down by the top layer of cake without spilling over too much. If your berries are all about the same size, simply dot them over the cream. If you are using strawberries of different sizes, cut them up first.

6 Place the other cake on top and decorate with more fruit if you like.